Allasiaspear
by Diatomaceous
Summary: Loki has an equine soul (strong M warning)


Thor stood on a rise looking down on the boulder strewn cavern where Loki's demon torturers cavorted. Loki was bent bow-like face up over a jagged slab of stone, a thick chain running over his chest and neck to keep his face exposed to the burning acid that dripped like snake venom from the stalactites into his eyes. He screamed and thrashed at each drop and the demons laughed with sick joy. The fact that they had been at their work for some time was evident in Loki's battered and broken appearance-they were even now gathering to confer about the next atrocity to visit on their prisoner. Thor thought hard about just turning back the way he had come, but Fenrir's condition weighed on his mind.

The demons were too intent on their conference to notice his approach. They came to some consensus in their gnashing language and a moment later had stripped Loki of the chain and the meager rags he still wore. They flipped him over onto his face and a demon with a thick, hard phallus stepped up and began to prod at his backside. At the touch of the thing, Loki let go a strangled wail and raked his fingers bloody against the rock, desperate to get away. The creature sank long claws into his hips and would have brutally thrust into him had Thor not banished them all to some unknown void with a thunderous bellow and the crashing blow of Mjolnir.

Loki lay where they had left him, his many wounds seeping blood and other vile humours. He was choking out something through shuddering sobs that Thor could hardly make out.

"Brother… have mercy… bring them back."

Thor thought his brother was babbling until he realized that Loki had already begun to heal. The demons could afflict pain and torture to a new and worse degree if their handiwork was left to mend a bit now and then.

"Villain, I have no mercy for thee. You sought to doom an entire world to decimation for the pleasure of being made an overlord. I uphold your condemnation by all the realms and come, not to give you respite, but to order you to take your petty curse off my horse!"

To Thor's amazement, Loki actually managed a strangled laugh through his veil of tears. "Does he pine, brother, the mighty Fenrir? Does he look for me at the paddock gate? I can assure you he will decline until these tortures cease."

Thor gripped Mjolnir tight in anger, thinking that someone should have sewn the tricksters' mouth shut with rusty wire.

"I have no authority over what misery befalls you here, though I might suggest to the council that a few centuries be removed from your sentence of torment," Thor said, blandly. "But, as you seem to find some amusement in it, I will leave you to your travails." He made as if to leave and made sure Loki could hear the gibbering of his demon jailors as he drew them back into existence.

"Wait," Loki groaned desperately, all guile suddenly gone at the prospect of being handed back over to the monsters.

Thor continued on his way as if he did not care to hear.

"Wait!" The call was now a pleading cry, and when Thor ignored it again, Loki called out a single word that stopped Thor in his tracks: "_Allasiaspear_."

Mjolnir shattered the rock next to Loki's head as Thor suddenly assailed him, the larger man wrenching him up to face him and pressing a hard forearm against his brothers' throat.

"How do you know that name?" He spat angrily, holding the hammer threateningly above Loki's ashen face.

"Because…" Loki choked, fresh tears cascading from the corners of his ruined eyes into his torn, disheveled hair. "Because...it was me," he finally gasped.

Thor, in sudden horrified bewilderment, stepped back. With nothing to hold him, Loki slumped from atop the broken boulder and crumpled to the ground.

"That's not possible," Thor stuttered, stricken. "You don't have the kind of magic to _become_...and Fenrir...she foaled him!"

Loki folded in on himself and pressed his face to the cool ground beneath him, the accelerated ability to heal causing blazes of white-hot pain not far removed from the torture itself. He only had to breath one name to get Thor to understand: "Odin."

Thor bumped his back into a cave wall, then just slid to the floor to sit opposite his brother. He had lovingly cared for that abyss black mare, Hlangria. He had whispered his fears, secrets, longings into her silken ears and given her soul a name only he and the horse herself could know: _Allasiaspear_ \- arrow to my heart.

Loki was able to tell his part of the story in a few, mumbled phrases: Odin had cajoled his trickster son into helping him with a great farce he wanted to enact on a pompous sentry captain. Loki's power of illusion combined with Odin's control over the natural world had made the young man into Hlangria, - darker than night, stronger and swifter than any mount of the Valkyrie. The mare had then gone to tempt the captain's stallion while he was on parade in front of a crowd of bourgeoisies admirers . The impassioned beast had thrown its rider, much to the amusement of the masses, and gone prancing after the prize.

The bit of fun was accomplished rather nicely and would have ended there…except for the fact that the stallion's pursuit of Hlangria was in earnest and the mare could only run so far.

The AllFather seemed to be nowhere about when it came time to assist Loki.

Thor knew most of the story from there. He had been on patrol, had found the mare exhausted and wounded on the edge of Kings Canyon. He'd given her water from his own winged helmet, had tended the ragged "love bite" left on the back of her neck from an over-amorous suitor who, angered by her rejection, had used his teeth to hold her down and take what he wanted. That prince of Asgard had walked her home slowly and handled her with a kindness and affection in his touch such as Loki had never known from his own brother.

Loki waited patiently for Odin to discover him in the royal stables and help him transform back into himself, enjoying the hours Thor spent in the stall ministering to the needs of a horses' wellness. The man talked of things he would never have revealed to another sentient soul, including his concern for a missing brother.

Loki wondered at Odin's seeming absence and looked anxiously for his father when let out to pasture.

Thor eventually took the mare as his main stead and was more than surprised when the docile creature became agitated and belligerent in the presence of the AllFather. Odin's gaze merely slid over the mare without concern as he ordered Thor to reign her in and take care to choose a more worthy stead to present on parade. Hlangria's strange agitation, Thor decided, was due to the foal swelling in her belly and he took her out on parade and patrol less and less as she became heavy and more gravid. He spent hours with her as the time of foaling came close, leaning his body against the warm length of her face and muzzle, stroking her ears and naming her soul.

When her time came, he was there with gentle hands and calming voice to help her along and sooth the terror that left her shivering between waves of pain. When Fenrir finally came into the world, it was Thor who tended to the colt, cleaning it and getting it up on spindly legs, guiding it to nourishment. The mare took no interest in it, only stood with dull eyes and head hanging low.

Hlangria refused to eat and stopped responding to Thor's presence. He was forced to begin hand-rearing the colt, not sure which one of them he was more in fear of losing.

A few nights after Fenrir's birth, the mare merely walked out of the stall and away into the darkness while Thor lay asleep beside the colt, keeping it warm with his own body heat.

Finding a black horse in the shadowy woods and mountains of Asgard proved futile and Thor dejectedly called off the search after three days. On the way home, he all but stumbled over Loki!

His brother was but a shadow of himself, raving in his conscious moments and in a state of shattered health from the power it had taken to get back to his true form without Odin's help. Loki hovered between life and death for days and would speak to no-one about the ordeal that had brought him to this state, not even to the AllFather, who granted him a generous audience behind the locked sickroom doors.

On his way to nurse Fenrir late one night, Thor stopped to check how his brother slept and found the bed empty. Following a string of sightings by guards, he followed Loki to Fenrir's stall where he found the man embracing and weeping over the colt as if everything that had been broken in him had been mended by the mere existence of this one small life.

And so here they were, Thor confronted with the fact that the brother he had never been able to get close to had been, for a short time, a creature he had given his very heart too.

That Fenrir belonged to, no, _with_ Loki was undeniable. The horse had attached himself to the man from that first day, no matter that Thor had cared for and trained the young stallion from birth.

Thor looked at the broken heap that was his brother and knew that he was _Allasiaspear_, the soul of that mare who had gained Thor's love and trust. Loki had to be cast in another form to return the love and affection Thor had always proffered.

He could not leave him here.

...

An unexpected, thunderous crash surprised Tony Stark as he rummaged in the fridge for a midnight snack. He quickly slipped on a glove from the Iron Man suit he always had at hand since the battle in New York and cautiously made his way to the living room. In the middle of what had once been a very nice glass coffee table stood Thor still crackling a bit from traveling through the Bifrost. He supported a nearly unrecognizable figure at his side: Loki, wrapped in Thor's red cloak and looking helaciously worse for the wear.

And then there was the big damn horse!

It seemed unconcerned at having traveled through a wormhole and was nuzzling Loki's limp hand. The stallion gave a huff of excitement when the bloody fingers twitched against the velvet nose.

"Man of Iron," Thor said in his characteristic rumble. "Forgive the intrusion, but I have broken Loki from the dungeons of Asgard and am now fugitive with him from the AllFather. Will you succor us?


End file.
